Drupal Planet

Gpanels are drop in multi-column snippets for displaying blocks in vertical columns, such as 2 columns, 3 columns or 4 columns. Gpanels are an optional extra that come with the Genesis starter theme.

Gpanels are fluid, meaning they stretch and compress with the page width because they are built with percentages, this is similar to how regular Panels work although the layout method is quite totally different.

The Gpanels come in four delicious flavours…

When we think about factors determining our choice of Starter theme how often do we think of performance? I’d hazard a guess very few consider factors such as database queries and memory usage, whereas we are more inclined to be interested in ease of theming, documentation and support.

These tests compare 6 Drupal starter themes—Stark, Framework, Ninesixty, Zen and both Genesis starter subthemes (6.x-2.x-dev). For these tests each theme was in “live production mode”, meaning that any registry rebuild features were disabled and for Ninesixty the debug stylesheet was unset.

I have been performance testing my themes for quite some time. I thought it might be interesting to see how they stacked up against some of the other starter themes, at least to show the differences by comparison. However that is not the focus of this report. There is no intention of stating which is the best starter theme, nor are these tests exhaustive. Indeed there are some glaring ommissions, such as size of JavaScript files and the comment.tpl.php is not factored into total page weight.

Those things aside this is at least an interesting comparison and I hope to encourage you to factor in performance when making your starter theme selection.

The title attribute is something that’s been around longer than most of us can remember and its become one of the most commonly used, if not abused, attributes.

As far back as I care to look (4.7, 5 & 6) ) Drupal’s default node template has included a title attribute in the node title link (the one that normally appears on teasers wrapped in an <h2> heading). Drupal 7 hasn’t learnt from this past mistake either.

A quick fire list of semantic (X)HTML elements with brief notes on usage. POSH is the acronym for Plain Old Semantic HTML. POSH gives us an easy to remember acronym that encapsulates the simplicity, best practice and benefits of using semantic markup. You can learn more about POSH on microformats.org.